Opposition Political Parties in Exile

Many of the opposition parties that were suppressed inside the
country were reorganized abroad. In 1987 more than a dozen political
parties were active among the Iranian exile communities in Western
Europe, the United States, and Iraq. All of these parties belonged to
one of four broad ideological groups: monarchists, democrats,
Islamicists, and Marxists. With the notable exception of the Mojahedin
and the ethnic Kurdish parties, the expatriate opposition parties
eschewed the use of political violence to achieve their shared goal of
overthrowing the regime in Tehran.

Monarchists

The several monarchist political parties supported the restoration of
a royalist regime in Iran. With varying degrees of enthusiasm the
monarchists contended that Reza Cyrus Pahlavi, the eldest son (born
1960) of the last shah, was the legitimate ruler of the country. The
former crown prince proclaimed himself Shah Reza II in 1980 following
his father's death. Subsequently, he announced that he wanted to reign
as a constitutional monarch and have a role similar to the role of the
king of Spain. The most active monarchist group has been the Paris-
based National Resistance Movement of Iran under the leadership of
Shahpour Bakhtiar, the last royalist prime minister. The National
Resistance Movement's official position was to restore the 1906
constitution as its original drafters intended, with a shah that reigns
rather than rules. In 1983 Bakhtiar's group agreed to cooperate with
another Paris-based party, the Iran Liberation Front, which was led by
elder statesman and former royalist prime minister Ali Amini. In
general, the monarchist parties have been weakened by personality
conflicts among the several leaders. When Manuchehr Ganji, a former
royalist cabinet officer, broke with Amini in 1986, many Iran Liberation
Front followers joined him in forming a new rival party called the
Banner of Kaveh, after the legendary pre-Islamic blacksmith hero who
defeated an evil tyrant and restored the rule of ancient Iran to a just
shah.

Democratic Parties

The democratic parties also consisted of several groups, all of which
supported a republican form of government; some of them, such as the
National Democratic Front and the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran
(KDP), also espoused varying forms of socialism. The National Front,
under the nominal leadership of Karim Sanjabi, and the National
Democratic Front of Hedayatollah Matin-Daftari were both headquartered
in Paris. Neither the National Front nor the National Democratic Front
has engaged in significant political activity since 1982, although the
latter party joined the Mojahedin-dominated National Council of
Resistance in that year and was still a member in 1987. In contrast, the
KDP, which advocated political and cultural rights for the Kurdish
ethnic minority within a federally organized government, has been
fighting against the Islamic Republic since 1979. By the beginning of
1986, however, KDP forces had been driven out of Iranian Kordestan,
although they continued to conduct sporadic hit-and-run operations
against units of the army and Pasdaran from bases in Iraqi and Turkish
Kurdistan.

Islamic Groups

In 1987 the principal Islamic party in opposition to the government
of Iran was the Mojahedin, which had been founded in 1965 by a group of
religiously inspired young Shias. All were college graduates who
believed that armed struggle was the only way to overthrow the shah. In
the early 1970s, the Mojahedin engaged in armed confrontations with the
military and carried out acts of terrorism, including the assassination
of an American military adviser. The Mojahedin was crushed for the most
part by 1975, but it reemerged in early 1979 and revitalized itself. Its
interpretations of Islam, however, soon brought the organization into
conflict with the IRP. During the summer of 1981, the Mojahedin
unsuccessfully attempted an armed uprising against the government. More
than 7,500 Mojahedin followers were killed during the conflict, and
within one year the organization had once again been crushed.

Rajavi, the leader of the Mojahedin, managed to escape from Iran with
Bani Sadr in July 1981. In France he reorganized the Mojahedin and tried
to broaden its appeal by inviting all nonmonarchist parties to join the
National Council of Resistance, which he and Bani Sadr established to
coordinate opposition activities. Although most of the political parties
refrained from cooperating with the Mojahedin, it nevertheless was most
successful in recruiting new members and establishing a loyal following
in United States and West European cities with sizable Iranian
communities. From the perspective of the other political parties, one of
the Mojahedin's most controversial positions was its public endorsement
of direct contacts with Iraq, beginning in 1983. This was a contentious
issue even within the National Council of Resistance and eventually led
to Bani Sadr's break with Rajavi in 1984.

The Mojahedin maintained clandestine contact with sympathizers in
Iran, and these underground cells regularly carried out isolated
terrorist acts. For this reason, Tehran was more concerned about the
Mojahedin than any other opposition group based abroad. The freedom of
operation that the Mojahedin enjoyed in France became one of the issues
that led to increasingly strained relations between the Iranian and
French governments after 1982. When Paris actively sought to improve
relations in late 1985, Prime Minister Musavi set restrictions on the
Mojahedin as one of the conditions for normalizing relations. In June
1986, France pressured the Mojahedin to curtail its activities. This
move prompted Rajavi to accept an invitation from President Saddam
Husayn of Iraq for the Mojahedin to establish its headquarters in
Baghdad. Following the move to Iraq, the Mojahedin set up military
training camps near the war front and periodically claimed that its
forces had crossed into Iran and successfully fought battles against the
Pasdaran. In June 1987, Rajavi announced the formation of the newly
reorganized and expanded National Army of Liberation, open to
non-Mojahedin members, to help overthrow the government of Iran.

Marxists

Like the Mojahedin, several Marxist political parties have maintained
clandestine cells inside the country. Tudeh leaders, who managed to
escape the government's mass arrests and forcible dissolution of their
party in early 1983, reestablished the Tudeh in exile in the German
Democratic Republic (East Germany). The Fadayan Majority, which later in
1983 suffered the same fate as the Tudeh, was decimated by government
persecution; its surviving members eventually joined the Tudeh. The
Komala (Komala-ye Shoreshgari-ye Zahmat Keshan-e Kordestan-e Iran, or
Committee of the Revolutionary Toilers of Iranian Kordestan), a
predominantly, but not exclusively, Kurdish party, had rejected as early
as 1979 the Tudeh and Fadayan Majority policy of cooperation with the
regime and continued to fight against central government forces up to
the end of 1985, when it was forced to retreat to Iraqi Kurdistan. The
Fadayan Minority had joined the Mojahedin uprising in 1981 and
consequently lost most of its cadres in the ensuing confrontation with
the regime. It has party offices in several West European cities and on
university campuses in the United States. The Paykar, which also joined
the Mojahedin's unsuccessful rebellion, was largely destroyed by 1982,
although secret cells were believed still to exist in 1987.